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The Value Zone
Even though it’s been on my Kindle for a year, I just finished reading HCLT CEO Vineet Nayar‘s book, “Employees First, Customers Second“. It was low on my priority list because I already had read a slew of articles about the book when it was first released.
In EFCS, Vineet describes “the value zone” and “the so-called enabling functions” as follows:
So, how did Mr. Nayar “force” the superiors who dwell in the enabling functions to be accountable to the value-creators? He did it by effectively implementing the HCLT “Smart Service Desk” (SSD) – a twist on the typical problem management system employed by most companies to resolve customer issues. Here’s how it works:
- Whenever an employee has a problem or needs information, he or she opens a ticket that is directed to the appropriate department for handling (including senior management and the CEO).
- Each ticket has a deadline for resolution.
- The system is transparent so that all could see the contents of the tickets and where they are in the process.
- The employee who had opened the ticket is the one to determine whether the resolution is satisfactory, or if the issue has been resolved at all.
Shortly after placing the SSD into execution, people “were opening tickets at an average of thirty thousand per month (at a time when there was a total of about thirty thousand employees in the company)“. Vineet sums up the system’s success as follows:
People were embracing the system. It was a victory for honesty, transparency, and openness!
Related articles
- HCL Technologies quarterly net profit rises 50 percent (news.bioscholar.com)
- Why HCL Technologies puts employees ahead of customers (tech.fortune.cnn.com)
- HCL Tech Q1 net up 50% at Rs. 496.7 crore (thehindu.com)
- Valuing Employees (Really!): Lessons from India (forbes.com)
Cronies Need Not Apply
In great orgs, cronies need not apply for influential positions because there’s no chance of them getting appointed. In DYSCOs, CLORGs, and BOOGs, cronies need not apply because they’re guaranteed to get anointed.
Concealing Outrage
In “The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work“, Harvard B-school professor and researcher Theresa Amabile writes:
Did she say “most” orgs ? Thank Allah she didn’t say “all” orgs, no?
If you think Ms. Amabile’s assertion is true, why do you think it is true? Could it be that the culture at those orgs is unintentionally, but irreversibly, toxic? Could it be that “suppression of emotionally strong opinions” is an innate attribute of hierarchically structured orgs? What about your org? If you’ve never seen a test of Theresa’s assertion at your org, why is that? If you have directly seen, indirectly heard about, or have been a participator in a “strong emotional, strong opinion” situation, how did it turn out and how did you feel? What about the “loath to reveal themselves to superiors” assertion? Got any thoughts about that?
Ironic
It’s like ten thousand spoons when all you need is a knife – Alanis Morissette
I find it curiously ironic that despite what may be espoused, software developers are often placed on one of the lowest rungs of the ladder of stature and importance (but alas, the poor test engineers often rank lowest) in many corpricracies whose revenue is dominated by software-centric products. Yet, it seems that many front-line software project managers, software “leads“, and software “rocketects” are terrified of joining the fray by designing and writing a little code here and there to lead by example and occasionally help out. In mediocre corpo cultures, it’s considered a step “backward” for titled ones to cut some code.
Fuggedaboud writing some code, a lot of the self-pseudo-elite dudes are afraid of even reading code for quality. Hence, to justify their existence, they focus on being meticulous process, schedule, and status-taking wonks – which of course unquestioningly requires greater skill, talent, and dedicated effort than designing/coding/testing/integrating revenue generating code.
Z6
In case you were wondering, Z6 stands for Zappos core value number 6:
I’m a huge Zappos fan and a VIP member (which means free overnight shipping for any purchase!). Thus, I get daily e-mails from zappos.com on special deals. The snippet you see above appeared at the bottom of one of those e-mails.
The joyful reason for this post is that Zappos is (rightfully) tenacious about promoting their 10 core values both internally and externally. CEO Tony Hsieh and his merry band truly understand how difficult it is to sustain and maintain a culture of joy and excellence – which is a pre-requisite to both financial and emotional success. Thus, with every chance they get, which includes the daily e-mail, they spread the word.
How about your company? Do you even know what their core values are, let alone “walk the talk“? Nah, an approach like Zappos’s won’t work there, right? It’s simply auto-assumed that writing down some inarguable altruisms and pontificating about them from time to time does the trick. There are more important issues to tend to, no?
Watch And Learn List
After watching Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst talk about “cultivating trust” in this refreshing 5 minute MIX video, I put him on my “watch and learn list“. Here are some priceless sound bytes from Jim’s passionate schpeel:
- You truly have to have no consequences.
- Says easy, does hard.
- The biggest insult is to have somebody throw out a comment or idea, and have nobody respond to it.
- Meritocracy does not equal democracy.
- Being called an idiot is not a bad thing. I encourage it and I celebrate it.
- If the senior leadership team isn’t posting on the site, isn’t responding to comments that are being made, then it’s nothing more than an “HR program“.
So, who’s on your watch and learn list?
Inner Work Life
The premise behind Theresa Amabile’s “The Progress Principle” is that individual performance in the work place is a function of the quality of one’s “Inner Work Life” (IWL). In addition, the greatest effector of a positive IWL is “continuing progress on meaningful work“.
To set the context for her subsequent findings, at the beginning of the book Ms. Amabile describes her research protocol:
“We recruited 238 people in 26 project teams in 7 companies in 3 industries. Some of the companies were small start-ups; some were well established, with marquee names. But all of the teams had one thing in common: they were composed primarily of knowledge workers, professionals whose work required them to solve complex problems creatively. Most of the teams participated in our study throughout the course of a particular project—on average, about four months. Every workday, we e-mailed everyone on the team a diary form that included several questions about that day. Most of those questions asked for numerical ratings about their inner work lives—their perceptions, emotions, and motivations during that day. The most important question allowed our respondents free rein: “Briefly describe one event from today that stands out in your mind. Amazingly, 75 percent of these e-mailed forms came back completed within twenty-four hours, yielding nearly 12,000 individual diary reports.”
The figure below shows the three tightly integrated and inseparable components of IWL and four major external forces that act upon it.
Of course, the quality of IWL can vary from month-to-month, day-to-day, and even hour-to-hour, depending on the presence and magnitude of the external forces acting upon it and the person-specific thoughts/feelings/motivation regarding said forces.
Contributors to an increase in IWL are catalysts, nourishers, meaningful work, and especially, progress on that meaningful work. Detractors are meaningless work, inhibitors, toxins, and setbacks to progress.
In orgs that are setup (either intentionally or unintentionally) as internally competitive command and control hierarchies where “me” is king, inhibitors, toxins, and setbacks abound. In great orgs, which can be structured as collaborative hierarchies or as any other pattern, catalysts, nourishers, and progress are pervasive up and down and across the structure.
Of course, the best parts of Ms. Amabile book are when she exhibits many of the heartfelt entries written by real people from her massive stash of 12,000 diary entries. Read it and weep, or read it and leap for joy, or read it and “meh“.
Related articles
The Law Of Diminishing Returns…
Different Perceptions
In the spirit of reducing costs through the holy grail of “reuse“, this post leverages the (so-called) work done in the recent “One Of Four” post….
In DYSCOs and CLORGs, this is everybody’s perception:
Man, I wish I could cure myself of the addiction to use grumpies in my e-drawings. The practice is unprofessional and childish, but I deploy the putrid piles for the following purposes: 1) to ratchet up the impact, 2) as a differentiating “branding” gimmick, and 3) to coverup the lack of substance in the accompanying words. The acerbic words and sophomoric readme.txt acronyms may already do the trick though, no?
What do you think, dear reader? Should BD00 dispense with all the crap? Do you think BD00 is capable of, and willing to, step into the alien world of respectable discourse?
One Of Four
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Meh!
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